Recently in The Burning Crusade Category

Last night we had planned to just try out Black Morass. We were not hopeful. Of course, our usual limitation is that we only have three players for a five-man instance, but we've learned to overcome that. Nominally, BM is a level 69 instance, but many consider it harder than some of the level 70 instances. Indeed, with a 68 tank, 69 dpser and a 69 healer who dinged 70 while we were there (grats Chepi!), we were clearly on the hairy edge, but after an initial wipe and our lessons learned, we actually won!

The elation went to our heads and we decided to push our luck by taking on the Headless Horseman. Now, this is a level 70 seasonal boss for Hallow's End. He's not meant to be a pushover for a level 68 tank backed up by only two other players. He's not really meant to be easy. We smacked him down a grand total of 5 times (one of us had not picked up the daily, so he couldn't summon a second time) without breaking a sweat! It was tons of fun, and the first level 70 purples that these characters have seen.

There were only two down-sides: we only got the caster rings (though the pet and the broom both dropped once each) and we forgot to screenshot it. Oh well, back to it tonight to kick his butt and take some pics!

Ever since The Burning Crusade came out, I've been a fan of the Caverns of Time instances, and Old Hillsbrad is probably my favorite. Being transformed into a human, saving Thrall, and seeing a favorite zone from the game returned to its previous state is just too cool. So you can imagine that as Saturnalia have been leveling and 3-manning all the 5-man instances, I've wanted to know how we would fare here....

Party: Chepi (heals,dps), Jazred (dps), Himalountain (tank, aoedps)

Levels: 63-64
Status: Blood Furnace full clear

Between this last week and our normal Saturday get-together we cleared Slave Pens and Underbog except for The Black Stalker. The final boss of Underbog had some horrible reset issues, resetting as soon as it had me (tank) in its beam. We'll figure that one out and give him another go.

Party: Chepi (heals,dps), Jazred (dps), Himalountain (tank, aoedps)

Levels: 62-63
Status: Blood Furnace full clear

Well, Blood Furnace turns out to be a dungeon I'd avoided somehow, so it was all new to me. What struck me most was how gimicky the trash was. When you compare it to the old world, almost all old world 5-man dungeons had a mix of groups that you pulled, fought and killed and those groups that had a gimmick of some sort that made you have to switch up tactics, take out certain guys first or use your tanks in odd ways. Blood Furnace (and Ramparts) had almost nothing but gimmick groups. There's trash that stuns, silences, drops bombs ala Gnomeregan, knocks back, knocks down, charges and lots of stuff I imagine I'm forgetting. Broggok was probably the toughest boss fight, and he went down on our first try without even a glimmer of doubt about the outcome, but we wiped 2-3 times on trash.

Party: Chepi (heals,dps), Jazred (dps), Himalountain (tank, aoedps)

Levels: 61
Status: Ramparts, full clear
Milestones: Omor and Vazruden down

Our first Outlands instance (Hellfire Ramparts AKA Ramps) went smoothly. We had a fair amount of trouble with the Destroyers (as usual, trash is almost always harder than bosses), but for a group of three 61s, we kicked some serious orc ass. Of note were the flawless executions on Omor and Vazruden (pictured, right). We cleared them both on the first try with our newly specced Resto Shammy barely breaking a sweat keeping our crazy selves alive! Edit: our shammy tells me that he just made it look easy, and in reality, the last fight was very close.